Tuesday, January 31, 2017

AMY GOODMAN: The race for the White House was jolted Friday when
FBI Director James Comey notified congressional leaders that the agency had
discovered more emails as part of its probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a
private email server. The emails were discovered as part of an investigation
into former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton
aide Huma Abedin. Abedin reportedly stored hundreds of thousands of emails on
Weiner’s computer, which was seized by the FBI after Weiner allegedly sent illicit
text messages to a 15-year-old girl. Comey notified Congress before the FBI had
even obtained a warrant to look at Abedin’s email. A warrant was reportedly
issued on Sunday night.

On the campaign trail, Donald
Trump welcomed Comey’s announcement, which came just 11 days before Election
Day.

DONALD TRUMP: Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have
never [seen before]. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval
Office. I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of
Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that
they made. This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people
fully understood, and it is everybody’s hope that it is about to be corrected.
... The news this morning is—this is bigger than Watergate.

HILLARY CLINTON: It’s pretty strange to put something like that
out with such little information right before an election. In fact—in fact,
it’s not just strange, it’s unprecedented. And it is deeply troubling, because
voters deserve to get full and complete facts. And so, we’ve called on Director
Comey to explain everything right away, put it all out on the table, right?'

AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton is not alone in criticizing FBI
Director Comey’s actions. A bipartisan group of former federal prosecutors
signed an open letter, writing, quote, "Many of us have worked with
Director Comey; all of us respect him. But his unprecedented decision to
publicly comment on evidence in what may be an ongoing inquiry just eleven days
before a presidential election leaves us both astonished and perplexed,"
they wrote.

The criticism of the FBI
director has come from both Democrats and Republicans. Richard Painter, the
former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, filed a
complaint against the FBI for possibly violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits
employees of the executive branch from engaging in political activity. Painter wrote
in The New York Times, quote, "I never thought that the F.B.I.
could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations.
Until this week," he wrote. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid also
suggested Comey may have broken the Hatch Act. Meanwhile, former Attorney
General Eric Holder said Comey’s actions violated long-standing Justice
Department policies and tradition on the proper way to conduct investigations
during an election season.

To talk more about the news,
we’re joined by Michael Isikoff, chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News. [It means what it
means.] He’s joining us from Washington, D.C.

So, Michael, you broke the story
on Friday—on Saturday—Friday—that FBI Director Comey, when he wrote his
bombshell letter to Congress Friday about the newly discovered emails, the
agents had not been able to review any of the material because they didn’t have
a warrant. Explain the significance of what has transpired over the last few
days.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF:Well,
it is an extraordinary set of circumstances here.And, you know, obviously, when Director Comey wrote
that bombshell letter on Friday, it raised all sorts of expectations. You had
Donald Trump talking about how this was bigger than Watergate, and members of
Congress saying that the FBI was reopening its investigation into the Hillary
Clinton email server.

But when you put this under
scrutiny, it was quickly apparent, and even reading closely what Director Comey
said, not just in his letter to Congress, but then what he later said that
night in his letter to—email message to all FBI agents seeking to explain his
decision, he made it clear that after being briefed about the discovery of
Abedin emails on the Anthony Weiner laptop, that had been seized in the course
of the child pornography investigation, that those emails were not—the FBI
agents had been unable to read them. They didn’t have legal authority to read
those emails, so they really didn’t know the content of the emails.What
Director Comey said in that letter to FBI agents is he decided to grant them
permission to seek access to those emails. And that was the tipoff. They hadn’t
reviewed the emails, so they don’t know—the FBI, as we speak, does not know
whether those emails are duplicates of what they’ve already seen, whether they
have any relevance to the Clinton email investigation, whether they contain
classified information. They may, and this may turn out to be a treasure trove,
for all we know. But based on what the FBI knows at this point—they just got
the search warrant last night—they have no idea of the content of the emails.
They can see that these were emails forwarded from—by Huma Abedin at the State
Department to an account. It might be—have been a personal Yahoo account, or it
might have been her Clinton email server account that she had access to on this
laptop she shared—apparently shared with her husband. But what was in those
emails, we don’t know.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, the FBI agents who see this trove of emails,
reportedly something like 650,000 emails—is that right?

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: That’s 650,000 emails that were on the
computer. Most of those were Anthony Weiner’s emails. Some portion of them, in
the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, were Abedin emails.

AMY GOODMAN: So, these email—do you think they actually didn’t
look at them? I mean, I understand they didn’t have an arrest warrant, but—

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Search warrant.

AMY GOODMAN: A search—sorry, a search warrant. But do you think
they looked at them? I mean, they were right there.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Well, they would have been able to see the
metadata. They could have seen—they apparently saw that they were from the
State Department. Huma Abedin, when she was questioned by the FBI as part of
that Clinton email investigation back in—she was questioned back in April—she
said she routinely forwarded State Department emails that she got on her
StateDepartment.gov account to either her personal Yahoo account or her Clinton
email server account, she said, to print them out. She said she had difficulty
printing StateDepartment.gov emails out, so she would forward them to these—to
her personal accounts on those two—at those two addresses. So, I think that we
can surmise that is probably the universe of what we’re talking about: State
Department emails that she forwarded to those two accounts. What was in them,
we don’t know.

I should say that in her
Judicial Watch testimony—Judicial Watch has sued Clinton over failure—and the
State Department, over failure to adhere to Freedom of Information Act
requests. She was deposed in that. She said that the emails she forwarded to
her Yahoo account were State Department press clips. Now, if she was truthful
in that, we may—the FBI may be looking at a lot of State Department press
clips. Or it may be looking at more than that. But I think the important point is that
Director Comey didn’t know, when he wrote that letter, and his own agents
didn’t know. They could see that they were forwarded from the State Department,
but they could not—they didn’t have legal authority to review the content of
those emails.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, Michael, talk about the significance of
that. When FBI Director Comey released that letter on Friday, he reportedly was
briefed about even the existence of these emails just on Thursday.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you understand happened within the
Justice Department.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Well, look, there’s clearly enormous tensions
within the FBI and between the FBI and the Justice Department over this. There
are agents who are clearly not happy with Director Comey’s decision not to
recommend criminal prosecution of Hillary Clinton originally. Many of them have
made that clear through friends in the media, through former FBI agents who
appear regularly on Fox News and other conservative news outlets. That’s part
of Comey’s constituency, and I think it probably informs his decision-making process.

At some point after FBI agents
investigating the Weiner matter in late September seized the laptop, they
discovered these emails were on them. There is some question about how quickly
Comey was informed about this. There are reports just in the last day or so
that actually the FBI agents were aware of the existence of these Abedin emails
for some weeks. Comey only learns about it on Thursday, and he suddenly feels
like he’s got a real dilemma on his hands, because he’s told Congress the
Clinton matter has been closed, he’s told Congress if there’s new information
he’ll look at it, and suddenly on Thursday he’s told there is this potential
new information out there. He felt an obligation to inform Congress, based on
his testimony and, I think we can also surmise, based on the internal criticism
he had gotten for not being more aggressive in the first place on this. So he
was sort of dealing with those—you know, that is almost certainly what was on
his mind.

He informs the Justice
Department he’s going to write this letter, and the Justice Department says,
"Wait a second. We’re in the closing days of an election. We have firm
policies against taking investigative steps or making public announcements that
might influence the outcome of an election in the closing days." And
Director Comey chose to ignore that guidance from the Justice Department. The
senior Justice Department officials informed the FBI of this. Loretta Lynch,
the attorney general, did not directly speak to Comey about it. I think there
was also a concern on the Justice Department’s part that if they ordered Comey
not to send the letter, that that would look like they were covering up or
concealing or protecting Hillary Clinton. They didn’t want to be put in that
position. And so, as a result, we have this really extraordinary mess on our
hands.

AMY GOODMAN: You have FBI, it sounds like, and the Justice
Department in disarray. In headlines, we just reported on the Eric Garner
investigation and how the Justice Department has just removed all the FBI
agents and lawyers involved in the investigation into Daniel Pantaleo and the
officers who were involved in the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: And they were just let off—they were just removed last
week.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Right. Look, it is not unusual for there to be
disagreements between FBI agents and federal prosecutors and federal
prosecutors in the field and main Justice Department officials. Let’s remember,
you know, senior Justice Department officials are political appointees. They
have agendas. FBI agents have their own perspectives.So, these
sorts of internal disagreements are not—certainly not unprecedented. What is
unprecedented is to have this spill out in the closing days of an election,
particularly as it relates to an investigation or a closed investigation or
matter affecting one of the presidential candidates. That’s what’s really
unprecedented.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds, Michael. What is your
prediction of what happens next? The FBI has clearly said it will not have any
conclusions before the election.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: There’s no way they can have conclusions before
the election. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, given the amount of tension
this has concerned, if Director Comey doesn’t find some way to address the
criticism he’s getting right now—it’s pretty withering—and may try to explain
his decision-making process a little better. Whether it will satisfy anybody is
anybody’s guess at this point.

AMY GOODMAN:And finally, it is quite
something—what you reported in Yahoo News is that Abedin, when you looked back
at her testimony in April, she referred to this other computer. Why wasn’t it
taken at the time?

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: That is a very good question. She referred to
the fact that she was sharing emails among her accounts, and the logical
follow-up would have been on what devices were those accounts accessible. And
it’s not clear that the FBI agents did that, followed up. And, you know,
perhaps if they had, they might have learned back then about the existence of
these emails and could have—and could have searched them at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Isikoff, chief investigative correspondent
for Yahoo News, [It means what it means.] his new piece,
which we will link to, "Exclusive: FBI still does not have warrant to
review new Abedin emails linked to Clinton probe." It got that warrant on
Sunday, and we will continue, of course, to follow this story.

This is Democracy Now!When we come back, what’s happening at the standoff at Standing
Rock? We bring you some shocking video of a security guard, who’s covered his
face in a bandana, with an automatic weapon, as he tries to infiltrate the
water protectors.Stay with us.